How did Steven Spielberg make ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Schindler’s List’ in a single year?
In 1980, American novelist Thomas Keneally left a book signing in Beverly Hills and went in search of a new briefcase. He walked into the leather goods shop of Holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg, who insisted on telling anyone who would care to listen about the man who had saved his life: Oscar Schindler. Pfefferberg asked Thomas what he did for a living. “I’m a writer,” he said, to which Pfefferberg replied: “I’m got the best story of the century”. After two years of research, Keneally released Shchindler’s Ark, a copy of which soon found its way to a young director called Steven Spielberg.
The story resonated with Spielberg, who read Thomas’ book in 1982. The director had been raised as an orthodox Jew and had already experienced his fair share of antisemitism. “It was something that occurred to me that I could pass on to my children through what I do best,” Spielberg explained, “which is telling stories on film”. Of course, in the mid-1980s, the stories Spielberg was used to telling tended to be about extraterrestrials and Nazi-whipping archaeologists.
Spielberg was yet to come to terms with his heritage and the discrimination he’d faced as a child and was hesitant to take on the project. None of this stopped Universal’s Sidney Sheinberg from buying the film rights to Schindler’s Ark. In 1983, Spielberg met Poldek Pfefferberg for the first time. When asked when he intended to start the film, the director explained that it would be another ten years before he was ready. And so, Spielberg continued pumping about family-friendly crowdpleasers like Hook while attempting to entice other directors to take the script off his hands. Roman Polanski, himself a Holocaust survivor, rejected Spielberg’s offer. He subsequently traded the Schindler script for Scorsese’s Cape Fear. Martin began developing the film, at which point Steven suddenly realised he’d made a terrible mistake and asked for the script back. Scorsese agreed to hand it over, recognising that it was a story Spielberg needed to tell.
After a decade of growth, Spielberg was finally ready to tell the story of Schindler’s Ark. But he had another film to make first: Jurassic Park, a huge undertaking by anyone’s standards. The director’s original plan was to create the dinosaurs using stop animation, hiring revered animator Phil Tippett for the job. After countless tests, the results still looked decades out of date, and Tippett was replaced by special effects veteran Dennis Muren, who had the bright idea of creating the dinosaurs using CGI.
Spielberg had just given himself a mammoth task. Making the dinosaurs look convincing meant animating every single muscle and tendon, something that had never been done before. All this talk of CGI was beginning to remind Speilberg of his father, a celebrated computer scientist, so he decided to concentrate on what he did best: telling stories on film. As he reassured tech-phobic Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, “Effects are only as good as the audience’s feeling for the characters.” With that, Steven was liberated.
With principal photography for Jurassic Park behind him, Speilberg travelled to Krakow, where shooting for Schindler’s List began on March 1st, 1993. Jurassic Park had been storyboarded within an inch of his life, so he was keen to shoot this one on the fly, permitting himself to make decisions on the day. His first stylistic choice was the drain the film of colour, reflecting the monochrome palette of World War Two documentaries. His second was to make the camera invisible. Of course, he still needed to confront the subject matter head-on. The director understood that his unflinching portrait of the holocaust would come as a shock to those familiar with his previous films, and he made sure to warn audiences that Schindler’s List was far more graphic than anything they may have seen before.
In the end, it was Spielberg himself who bore the brunt of the emotional burden. To add insult to injury, Jurassic Park wasn’t even finished. He was constantly jumping in and out of video calls with the CGI team so that he could critique the lighting and physical movements of the dinosaurs. This required a frankly insane level of compartmentalisation from the director. By day, he was working with actors to form a portrait of genocide. By night, he was working with the Jurassic Park CGI team to create realistic dinosaurs for a popcorn monster movie. No wonder Spielberg described that period as “a living hell”. At one point, he even considered calling the Jurassic Park crew and telling them to go home. Compared to Schindler’s List, the whole thing felt utterly inconsequential.
On release, the two films were handled in incredibly different ways. Where Jurassic Park’s success was measured in the number of tickets sold and the amount of merchandise bought by fans, the triumph of Schindler’s List was measured by the emotions felt by its audience. Spielberg wasn’t even necessarily thinking about winning the ‘Best Director’ Oscar. In the end, of course, he won the ‘Best Director’ gong for Schindler and walked home with the ‘Best Picture’ award for Jurassic Park. During his acceptance speeches, he thanked two important people: his wife, who he thanked “for rescuing me 92 days in a row”, and “a survivor called Poldek Pfefferberg”, without whom Schindler’s List would not have been possible.
